5. oh yes, it is beyond bad. It is a DISGRACE!

38. I remember a Nightline episode back in the early 90's when the ratio was closer to 50:1

Ted Koppel interviewed the Japanese head of Sony and asked him what was wrong with American business:
1. Ratio of CEO pay to worker pay.
2. Lack of input from workers into how company is run.
3. Lack of job security.

12. American culture is based on the slave economy

I don't mean to use the word "slave" lackadaisically, but that's how our country has founded and the same mentality exists today and probably forever. They think we need to be motivated by masters who are unapproachable in power. I would love for this notion to change, though.

13. Years ago I read that Akio Morita, the founder of Sony,

never took a salary of more than about $100,000 per year and lived in a modest apartment in Tokyo. Yeah, this was back in the 1970s, but Morita was quoted as saying that it would be "inappropriate" and unseemly to take more money.

46. I worked for Sony for many years...that is true.

Unfortunately, now that Morita has passed, the company seems to be dying too.

Although Sony tended to take on some of the corporate culture of whatever country they were operating in, they never let you forget that Sony is a Japanese company. The executives still had nice offices, but it wasn't unusual to see upper management working in cubes right alongside everyone else. They felt isolated in the big corner offices the American corporate culture provided.

33. Politifact fact-check:

. . .

We located a scanned version of the paper on the Internet, and it did appear to be written by Prof. Mark Kroll. His institution wasnít listed, but after some additional searching, we found that Kroll had been teaching at the Louisiana Tech College of Business in 2005 and that he is now the business dean at the University of Texas at Brownsville. But it turns out he didnít write the paper after all.

"Actually, I am the Ďrecipientí of the paper you refer to," Kroll told us in an e-mail. "The paper was done as a class project by three of my students in a graduate class back in 2005. The 475-to-1 ratio that you reference is listed in a table in the paper the students wrote. They do not give a specific citation for the data in the table."

The paperís cover sheet fooled us -- as it fooled others -- because the professorís name appears in the middle of the page, and the three studentsí names appear together at the bottom in a less prominent spot. We tried to reach the co-authors -- Adam Choate, Dana Rowzee and Jerrod Tinsley, all of whom were working on their Master of Business Administration in 2005 -- but we did not hear back.

So how about the substance of the chart?

From previous fact-checks, we knew that American CEOs are generously paid, and we had confirmed that for ordinary Americans, incomes are stagnating.

But on the specific comparison of CEO pay and average-worker pay, we found two liberal groups -- the Economic Policy Institute and the Institute for Policy Studies -- that have produced long-running studies of this question.

. . .

. . .the most recent ratio from the Institute for Policy Studies is also smaller -- for 2010, it was 325 to 1. In previous years the ratio on two occasions has exceeded 475 to 1 -- to be specific, 516 to 1 in 1999 and 525 to 1 in 2000.